Some bits of business…
- August 6, 2026 — Committee of the Whole, 5:00–5:50 p.m.
- Discussion of Legislative Priorities
- Capital Improvements Plan
- August 6, 2026 — City Council Study Session, 6:00–10:00 p.m.
- Capital Improvements Plan
- 2027/2028 Budget Goals
- Executive Session: Property Acquisition RCW 42.30.110(1)(b)
- August 13, 2026 — City Council Regular Meeting, 6:00–10:00 p.m.
- King County Metro Presentation to Council
- Update from King County Library System on Programming – Erik Matthews
- Community Engagement Officer Introduction & 2026 Workplan
- Crimes in Washington Report
- Stormwater Management Action Plan – Phase 2 Task Assignment
- Interlocal Agreement with Highline WD
- 16th Ave Storm Project Construction and CM Contracts
- Midway Park RCO Grant Authorization Resolution/Approval
- Shiferaw Final Plat Approval
- Signal Maintenance Agreement with WSDOT
- Redondo Parking Lot Resurfacing & Striping Project – Public Works Construction Contract Award
- Public Hearing: Development Agreement
- 223rd Options
- Capital Improvements Plan – 1st Reading
- Development Agreement Ordinance – 1st Reading
- MOU with Food Bank
- August 27, 2026 — City Council Regular Meeting, 6:00–10:00 p.m.
- Des Moines Historical Society – New Executive Director
- Des Moines Creek Estuary Restoration – 30% Design and Public Outreach Update
- Community Engagement Services Fall/Winter Activities
- 2026 2nd Quarter Financial Report
- Development Agreement Ordinance – 2nd Reading
- Groundwater Remediation Consultant Contract
- Judge Pro Tem Compensation – 1st Reading
- Capital Improvements Plan – 2nd Reading
- Marina Steps Innovative Stormwater Bioretention Testing, Grant and Consultant Contract Amendments
- 24th Ave S Improvements Project – S 223rd St to S 216th St – Transportation Improvements Board Grant and Professional Services Consultant Agreement
- September 3, 2026 — City Council Study Session, 6:00–10:00 p.m.
- Joint Meeting with Planning Commission – Downtown Planning Scenarios & Zoning
- September 10, 2026 — City Council Regular Meeting, 6:00–10:00 p.m.
- Hispanic Latino Heritage Month Proclamation
- Legislative Update from Senator Tina Orwall
- Comprehensive Safety Action Plan
- September 24, 2026 — City Council Regular Meeting, 6:00–10:00 p.m.
- Update on the Port of Seattle Economic Development Grant
- Canopy Preservation Program Update
- Discussion on MFTE Program
Future Agendas is the closest thing the City currently has to a calendar of upcoming City Council topics. It’s not always accurate. But until we develop a genuine calendar, this can be useful if there is a particular issue you don’t want to miss.
About The Cover: Sticking the landing
In my ‘bossdom’ if I got a chart like this, I might write a reply like…
I think we may have a perfect score here, Frank. Wait… mixing 10.3% and $10 and $1 with a penny? That gets a 9.3 from the cranky Irish Judge. Brutal.
The slide is such a great idea. But the confusing bit obscures the best part of the message. I think it’s trying to convey how little the City retains from every sales tax dollar–especially the new public safety piece.
But if your only takeaway is “Poor, little Des Moines!” you’re only seeing 1half the story. Even if we could improve the amount the City gets back from the State a little (and I’m all on board with that), it doesn’t hit the real message…
The amount of moolah generated by retail sales tax per square foot is ridonculously low unless you have something like the mythical ‘car dealership’. And that fact should condition our ‘strategic plan’. Sales Tax was never designed to be the backbone of the budget of a ‘bedroom community’ like Des Moines.
Regardless, there’s been this ongoing narrative that if you made Des Moines some sort of retail heaven all the sales tax would fix our fiscal woes permanently. So the story goes, if you bring ‘tens of thousands of people’ here, it would drive oodles of revenue. But that was never possible once you understand how the pie works in WA. People just don’t want to believe it, I guess.
That doesn’t mean retail is not valuable. It’s essential. We need more reasons for residents to be here. You can only visit ‘the Marina’ so often. You have to offer lots of other things.
But retail is not as calorie dense as other forms of revenue. It’s like the difference between eating a teaspoon of peanut butter and an entire bag of rice.
The reason cities like ours become addicted to the other kind of sales tax ( construction) is because you get this one, incredibly rich, tasty, check. Like peanut butter. But you only get it once. And after the peanut but… er… construction is done, you have to live off of a bag of rice for the next fifty years.
National Night Out is Tuesday August 4!
Tuesday is National Night Out. There are a bunch of places and because there’s only so much daylight, I tend to rotate. If you haven’t seen me in a while and would like to make sure I stop by, shoot me a call, text, email, smoke signal, flaming arrow. 🙂
What kind of city…?
I’m sure it will sound snarky, but what’s killing me atm in all the media kerfuffle over the ‘firing’ of the Seattle Police Chief is the focus on his severance package rather than the merits of the situation, I have no opinion on the politics of other cities. But the repeated comments all over TV and social media express outrage. “What kind of city hands out eighteen months of severance pay!?!” 😀
City Manager Stuff
City Manager Reports! July, 31 2026
Highlight for moi is the Cliff Ave. Road Closure: Through Wednesday, August 5, Cliff Avenue South and South 223rd Street, between 5th Avenue South and 6th Avenue South, will be closed daily from 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Vote!
Yes, it’s time for yet another primary election. No, I’m not on the ballot (whew.)
Do we have too many things to vote for? Yes. Yes we do.
However, as I write this, less than 14% of you have sent in your ballots. I am not angry. Just disappointed. Deeply disappointed, Des Moines. (Channeling me Gran, there. 😀 )
This Week
Thursday
Flood Control District Tour
See last week. Different week, same problems. 😀 Actually, this is closer to home–near Tukwila and Kent. The challenge is that every river and every flood plain is different. It’s not like there are standard IKEA solutions you can purchase. Each situation requires different engineering.
City Council
August 06, 2026 City Council Agenda Packet
Committee of the Whole
Item 1. 2027 Legislative Priorities – 30 Minutes. I support almost all of these but this is a bit weird. Previously we were cautioned to limit our requests to just a few items. This list is much more expansive, which seems a bit odd given how much we’ve been warned that the State budget is going to be like… what is the opposite of good? 😀
- Expanding local government revenue tools: supports protecting the Public Works Assistance Account and lifting the property tax cap; opposes unfunded state mandates.
- Redondo Esplanade Safety Project: Plan replacement of the 70+ year-old bulkhead and esplanade connecting to the boardwalk. $600,000 (planning).
- Seawall Replacement: Replace the failing southern marina seawall to protect upland and in-water assets and preserve public waterfront access. $1,000,000 (planning).
- Cliff Avenue Connector: Raise the pedestrian path above the roadway and improve ADA access between downtown and the waterfront. Transportation Budget (Non-Motorized) $600,000 (planning).
- Expanded public safety funding: Work with AWC, WASPC, and others to secure funding (with emphasis on behavioral health): extend and ease HB-2015 timelines, pursue flexible councilmanic funding, and expand use of traffic-camera fees and noise cameras.
- Sea-Tac mitigation funding: Support finding or reinstating funding for the disproportionate noise, air pollution, and other burdens the airport places on nearby residents. Ongoing structural funding is needed for area cities.
Item 2. 2027 – 2032 Capital Improvements Plan Discussion – 20 Minutes
This is a discussion on all the stuff we’ve built, are building, hope to build. It gets complicated because so many projects are funded from a bunch of different sources. I think this tends to obscure the financial picture. We get the funds. We don’t get the funds. Whatever. But what doesn’t get discussed enough are the projects not on the list–what I call ‘the magic wand’.
Get it? We’re not talking about what we’d like to happen enough–the goal setting one might expect in a for-profit corporation. These numbers/projects pre-limit the discussion to what staff have already decided are possible.
Study Session
Item 1. 2027 – 2032 Capital Improvements Plan Discussion – 20 Minutes. Deja vu? Nope. See it’s Item one. Not two. One. They’re different. 😀
This is also a bit weird. It’s good to have this discussion. But when we had standing committees, we would review this material there first. They were tedious and repetitive. But talking about this many projects and this much money once for 30 minutes is not great in principle.
Item 2. Discussion on 2027/2028 City Budget Goals and Priorities – 90 Minutes. Following on the same theme. The challenge for me is not having a sense of where we are. We’ve been talking about a strategic plan now for two years and I still have no idea what that really means. Goals are fine, but I have no idea how much money we have to work with.
Executive Session
Property Acquisition under RCW 42.30.110(1)(b) – 15 Minutes
Last Week
Thursday
Flood Control District Tour — Auburn! This thing is called a HESCO. It’s like a $1.5 million IKEA kit for making sandbags. It bisects a totally beautiful park which sucks. But this is what happens when you start having ‘100 year floods’ every five years. This is the temp solution–the real solution means re-engineering the White River using dollars that are eyewatering. Is this ‘climate change’? Sort of. The fact is, engineers make decisions based on norms. One norm was that river levels were lower. Another is that we used to dredge these waterways in a way that was fast, cheap, and catastrophic for fish like salmon. That stopped. But no one has developed an inexpensive, more eco-friendly dredging system. And it turns out that the river deposits 25,000 cubic yards of sediment every freakin’ year! So sooner or later it, ya know, builds up. It doesn’t matter if it’s climate change or the flying spaghetti monster. These costs were predictable–we just chose to ignore them didn’t prepare for the future.
I also stopped off to see how the Port of Seattle’s Mitigation land is doing–this was the 15 acres that was supposed to compensate for the loss of wetlands when building the Third Runway. Why is it in Auburn? Look here.
City Council Leadership Workshop — As I wrote previously, I had no idea what this was about other than this–and I did not vote for it. And now, having gone through it, I am even less thrilled. I know you like to think of Des Moines as a ‘small town’. But every year, whether one likes it or not, the material the City Council deals with gets more complicated. Every elected knows it. Some express frustration at the lack of information. Some are fine with it.
Now that we’ve abandoned committees, the number of meaningful decision-making events is at its lowest point since I’ve been watching in 2008. But if you don’t have committees, you keep the meetings as short as possible, and then you take 2-3 meetings a year for fluff like ‘team building’ you never gain the background to get better at the job.
I suppose complaining makes one a poor sport. But after a while, most people with any experience in ‘corporate world’ start to sense that at least some of this just might be intentional. 😀
Councilmember Nutting sometimes mentions his length of tenure (almost a dozen years now!) That is a lot of experience. But for the first ten years he was part of a committee system that provided the details he (and I) took for granted–which never happens now. There just isn’t enough time. I don’t know how newer colleagues learn the material without at least a few more ‘reps’.
1You know you’re really old when you start talking like Paul Harvey. 😀